this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2025
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I found the aeticle in a post on the fediverse, and I can't find it anymore.

The reaserchers asked a simple mathematical question to an LLM ( like 7+4) and then could see how internally it worked by finding similar paths, but nothing like performing mathematical reasoning, even if the final answer was correct.

Then they asked the LLM to explain how it found the result, what was it's internal reasoning. The answer was detailed step by step mathematical logic, like a human explaining how to perform an addition.

This showed 2 things:

  • LLM don't "know" how they work

  • the second answer was a rephrasing of original text used for training that explain how math works, so LLM just used that as an explanation

I think it was a very interesting an meaningful analysis

Can anyone help me find this?

EDIT: thanks to @theunknownmuncher @lemmy.world https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language-model its this one

EDIT2: I'm aware LLM dont "know" anything and don't reason, and it's exactly why I wanted to find the article. Some more details here: https://feddit.it/post/18191686/13815095

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[–] glizzyguzzler@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Too deep on the AI propaganda there, it’s completing the next word. You can give the LLM base umpteen layers to make complicated connections, still ain’t thinking.

The LLM corpos trying to get nuclear plants to power their gigantic data centers while AAA devs aren’t trying to buy nuclear plants says that’s a straw man and you simultaneously also are wrong.

Using a pre-trained and memory-crushed LLM that can run on a small device won’t take up too much power. But that’s not what you’re thinking of. You’re thinking of the LLM only accessible via ChatGPT’s api that has a yuge context length and massive matrices that needs hilariously large amounts of RAM and compute power to execute. And it’s still a facsimile of thought.

It’s okay they suck and have very niche actual use cases - maybe it’ll get us to something better. But they ain’t gold, they ain't smart, and they ain’t worth destroying the planet.